Lord Kelvin Quotes

I don't really get things very... intuitively. I mean, I don't immediately understand things. The only way I really get it is by writing it down.

Science is nothing, but trained and organized common sense.

I was always good at math and science and physics.

Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.

if you do not appreciate the mathematics, you cannot see, among the great variety of facts, that logic permits you to go from one to the other

You must acquire something of that industrious habit of mind which the study of natural science gives,—the art of comparing, of perceiving true likenesses and true differences, and so of classifying and arranging what you see; the art of connecting facts together in your mind in cause and effect

What I knew was I liked math and science, and I never wanted to memorize everything. I wanted to understand where it came from.

The man of science is a poor philosopher.

I didn't know what kinds of questions to ask in mathematics. In physics, I could see there were things that were known and things that weren't.

This book is about physics and its about physics and its relationship with mathematics and how they seem to be intimately related and to what extent can you explore this relationship and trust it.

I tend to approach things from a physics framework. And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.

They are deceptively simple. I admit that. But for me, all my life I try to simplify things. As a child in school, things were very hard for me to understand often, and I developed a knack, I think. I developed a process to simplify things so I would understand them.

If I am given a formula, and I am ignorant of its meaning, it cannot teach me anything, but if I already know it what does the formula teach me?

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

What is mathematics? It is only a systematic effort of solving puzzles posed by nature.

Doing physics is a lot of fun if you like it.

Women study things in order to figure out how they're connected to other things. I don't know if it's controversial to say that, but that's what I've seen from doing science for a couple of decades.

Algebra is the intellectual instrument which has been created for rendering clear the quantitative aspects of the world.

All science requires mathematics.

Physics without mathematics is meaningless.

There are three kinds of intelligence: one kind understands things for itself, the other appreciates what others can understand, the third understands neither for itself nor through others. This first kind is excellent, the second good, and the third kind useless.

Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.

All science requires mathematics. The knowledge of mathematical things is almost innate in us. This is the easiest of sciences, a fact which is obvious in that no one's brain rejects it; for laymen and people who are utterly illiterate know how to count and reckon.

Can you imagine young people nowadays making a study of trigonometry for the fun of it? Well I did.

Intelligence is the ability to take in information from the world and to find patterns in that information that allow you to organize your perceptions and understand the external world.